Analysis of Guided Lamb Wave Propagation (GW) in Honeycomb Sandwich Panels

The paper aims to introduce the guided lamb wave propagation (GW) in a honeycomb sandwich panels to be used in the health monitoring applications. Honeycomb sandwich panels are well-known as lightweight structures with a good stiffness behavior and a wide range of applications in different industries. Due to the complex geometry and complicated boundary conditions in such a structure, the development of analytical solutions for describing the wave propagation and the interaction of waves with damages is hardly possible. Therefore dimensional finite element simulations have been used to model GW for different frequency ranges and different sandwich panels with different geometrical properties. The waves, which are highly dispersive, have been excited by thin piezoelectric patches attached to the surface of the structure. In the first step, the honeycomb panel has been simplified as an orthotropic layered continuum medium. The required material data have been calculated by applying a numerical homogenization method for the honeycomb core layer. The wave propagation has been compared in the homogenized model with the real geometry of a honeycomb sandwich panel. Such calculations of high frequency ultrasonic waves are costly, both in creating a proper finite element model as well as in the required calculation time. In this paper the influence of changes in the geometry of the sandwich panel on the wave propagation is presented. c © 2010 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim